Kathleen Booth, early British computer scientist, died one month ago on Sept 29 at the age of 100. The Register published an obituary for her titled "RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language."
One month later, yesterday, a link to the obituary was the top (I think) post 1, 2 on both Hacker News and Reddit's programming subreddit
Many of the commenters lamented that they had never heard of this highly influential person, and other commenters suggested that the reason most people hadn't heard of her is because she was a woman.
Ironically, I would contend, the only reason we are hearing about her is because she was a woman.
Calling her the inventor of assembly language may be a stretch. One HN comment points out that the IEEE has already given a computer pioneer award to David Wheeler for inventing the first assembly language in 1949.
You can read her 1947 paper and decide if the table at the end counts as the first assembly language. It is a numbered list of 25 operations, a symbolic description of their action, and in a few cases an English description of their operation. It is, at least superficially, similar to the list of 30 operations Wheeler created for the EDSAC.
Ran out of time to delve into:
Grace Hopper falsely being credited for inventing COBOL
If Ada Lovelace invented programming, and if she did but no one knew about it and it didn't influence anyone else, should we credit her?
Booth's credit being recently discovered/promoted in 2018 Hackaday article
Margaret Hamilton being the only programmer popularly known for Apollo work, despite leading a small team of 3 people.
Hamilton and Booth both marrying their bosses.
All of these women being impressive in their own right, and exaggerating their contributions for Girl Power is a disservice to them.
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Kathleen Booth, early British computer scientist, died one month ago on Sept 29 at the age of 100. The Register published an obituary for her titled "RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language."
One month later, yesterday, a link to the obituary was the top (I think) post 1, 2 on both Hacker News and Reddit's programming subreddit
Many of the commenters lamented that they had never heard of this highly influential person, and other commenters suggested that the reason most people hadn't heard of her is because she was a woman.
Ironically, I would contend, the only reason we are hearing about her is because she was a woman.
Calling her the inventor of assembly language may be a stretch. One HN comment points out that the IEEE has already given a computer pioneer award to David Wheeler for inventing the first assembly language in 1949.
You can read her 1947 paper and decide if the table at the end counts as the first assembly language. It is a numbered list of 25 operations, a symbolic description of their action, and in a few cases an English description of their operation. It is, at least superficially, similar to the list of 30 operations Wheeler created for the EDSAC.
Ran out of time to delve into:
Grace Hopper falsely being credited for inventing COBOL
If Ada Lovelace invented programming, and if she did but no one knew about it and it didn't influence anyone else, should we credit her?
Booth's credit being recently discovered/promoted in 2018 Hackaday article
Margaret Hamilton being the only programmer popularly known for Apollo work, despite leading a small team of 3 people.
Hamilton and Booth both marrying their bosses.
All of these women being impressive in their own right, and exaggerating their contributions for Girl Power is a disservice to them.
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